The Modern Victory Garden

It was drizzling rain and cool today.   Not a great day to do too much in the garden but I did water the tomato and zucchini beds by running the soaker hoses for several hours in each of them.   They are covered by red plastic mulch and so even when it rains, I still need to do the weekly irrigation.   I had some helpers in the garden this afternoon as I was moving the irrigation water around and doing a few other odds and ends chores.                

The girls were out clearing the weeds in the walkways and occasionally stealing some turnip greens and kale whenever I was not vigilantly watching them.   All in all though they are generally well behaved and are allowed into the garden when I am out and about - so long as I am there to supervise.           

The second crop of strawberries is coming on.   I have harvested about four nice sized strawberries in the past day or so but I ate them right there in the garden so they have never made into my harvest totals or a picture.   Hopefully some of these green ones coming along will make it into the harvest recaps.    

One of the things I am working on currently is rooting out strawberry runners because I want to start a new bed of strawberries next year and take out the oldest one (now three years old).   Strawberry plants produce lightly their first year, heavily their second year, and then decline in production thereafter.   It is my practice to rotate out a bed after the third year and start a new one to replace it.   This year was my “in between year” in that one bed is now two years old and the other is in it’s third year, so I did not do any rotation or patch removal in 2010.   However, next year the oldest bed needs to go and a new one needs to be planted to replace it.   By rooting out the runners from my current patches and then over wintering them in pots, I save myself the expense of buying new starts.   As the runners form in the strawberry patch, I just clip them with my garden snips and then set them into very moist potting soil in a planter.    The trick is to keep them quite wet for the first week or so until they root out.   Once rooted out well, I will give them a side dressing of fertilizer and then give them routine care.   I have about half of the plants rooted out that I will need next year, but I will just keep adding them as they send out new runners until I have enough that are rooted out and growing well.   If all goes well, I will end up with around 30 to 40 starts, which is enough to properly plant up a new 8-foot by 4-foot bed.   

The cucumbers are starting to produce.   I picked one last night and another one this afternoon.   Taking the good advice of Daphne and Thomas, I decided to try refrigerator pickles this year so that I could make better use of these early light cucumber harvests.   It will be awhile before the plants start producing amounts at any one time sufficient to do a batch of my favorite dill pickle relish, so keeping a jar of dill pickle solution in the fridge allows me to just drop in a couple at a time as they mature.   Early this morning, I mixed up a simple solution of 6 cups of water, 3 cups of white vinegar, 3 tablespoons of canning salt, 3 tablespoons of sugar, a medium sized white onion sliced thinly, 1 very large clove of elephant garlic, and several fresh heads of dill plus chopped up fresh dill weed in a gallon glass jar.   The cukes were cut into spears and added to the solution and then all of it just went into the refrigerator.   I sampled two spears this evening and have to tell you that I think I prefer these to traditionally processed dills.   Heavenly!                   

I purposely made a very large batch of solution, so I would have lots of room to add cucumbers as they came available in the coming weeks.               

The bean patches are getting their groove on now and I expect to be harvesting beans in the very near future.   This is my second year of growing Sunset Runner beans.   I saved seed from these plants last year because they really performed well in my climate and growing region.   They will grow and produce beans in areas that are partially shaded - which is quite rare for most vegetables.   Unlike regular pole and bush beans though, runner beans require bees or other pollinators to complete pollination.   They grow just like pole beans but produce a much broader, slightly fuzzy, and more meaty bean – best picked while quite young as they get tough when older.                   

Can you spot my other regular garden helper in this photo?                

The flower on these beans is quite beautiful and it is almost worth growing them just for that feature alone.                                

The Pinto beans growing in the Three Sisters planting bed are just now flowering and I have yet to find any pods forming.   They seem to be growing just fine, but are lagging behind the other beans.   However, the Three Sisters plantings in general seemed to really take off last week.   The corn is tasseled and silks are formed; the pinto beans are flowering; and the pumpkins that I have hand pollinated have set some nice looking fruits.                      

The Dark Red Kidney bean patch is further along than the Pinto beans are.   It is a very full stand of bean vegetation now, flowering nicely and forming bean pods.   If you look closely you can see a volunteer crimson clover flower and a volunteer potato plant growing in and amongst the Dark Red Kidney beans.   

The Dark Red Kidney bean pods are forming.                               

The really pretty bean patches though are the Royal Burgundy bush beans.   I have two patches of this growing and although they were planted almost two weeks apart, they seem to have caught up to each other and are at roughly the same stage of maturity.                                       

I should be harvesting some of these purple-podded beans soon.   Too bad my various garden helpers won’t be pitching in to pick beans when the time comes!                

Laura

kitsapfreedomgardener